America’s National Labor Relations Board is an independent agency of the federal government that enforces U.S. labor law.

And its prosecutors “plan to formally accuse Amazon.com of illegally firing an activist who was trying to unionize its New York warehouses,” as well as other violations of the law, reports Bloomberg — unless Amazon settles the case first.

New York Focus reports that the fired worker had commuted from a homeless shelter to Amazon’s fulfillment center on New York’s Staten Island — a facility where Amazon has held mandatory anti-union meetings. But it’s not the only place there’s been tension between Amazon and union organizers:

In March, an NLRB investigation into the firing of Queens Amazon warehouse worker and labor leader Jonathan Bailey found that the company illegally interrogated and threatened him. NBC News reported that eight other workers also said “they had been fired, disciplined or retaliated against for protected activity.” A month later, the NLRB found that Amazon had illegally retaliated against Emily Cunningham and Maren Costa, who was fired in 2020 for their workplace activism while employed at Amazon’s headquarters in Seattle

The Amazon Labor Union (founded by current and former Amazon employees) “has filed a petition to hold an election at four of the e-commerce giant’s facilities in Staten Island,” Bloomberg reported Friday. And an official for the group told Bloomberg it could galvanize support for a union if they could get the fired worker reinstated. “It would be monumental for him to go back to the same building that he was terminated from and speak his truth and let workers know that it’s OK to speak out.”

Amazon has been grappling with an unprecedented wave of activism and organizing in North America, including walkouts over safety concerns in Staten Island and elsewhere, as well as unionization drives in Alabama, Canada and New York…. In December, Amazon reached a settlement with the labor board requiring the company to inform workers nationwide of their legal rights and to let employees organize on its property during their time off.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Amazon Activist’s Firing Deemed Illegal by Labor Board Officials

“Scientists have estimated the number of ‘small’ black holes in the universe,” reports Live Science. “And no surprise: It’s a lot.”

Using a new method, outlined January 12 in The Astrophysical Journal, a team of astrophysicists has produced a fresh estimate for the number of stellar-mass black holes — those with masses 5 to 10 times that of the sun — in the universe.

And it’s astonishing: 40,000,000,000,000,000,000, or 40 quintillion, stellar-mass black holes populate the observable universe, making up approximately 1% of all normal matter, according to the new estimate.

So how did the scientists arrive at that number? By tracking the evolution of stars in our universe they estimated how often the stars — either on their own, or paired into binary systems — would transform into black holes, said first author Alex Sicilia, an astrophysicist at the International School of Advanced Studies (SISSA) in Trieste, Italy. “This is one of the first, and one of the most robust, ab initio [ground up] computation[s] of the stellar black hole mass function across cosmic history,” Sicilia said in a statement….

To arrive at their estimate, the astrophysicists modeled not just the lives, but the pre-lives of the universe’s stars. Using known statistics of various galaxies, such as their sizes, the elements they contain, and the sizes of the gas clouds stars would form in, the team built a model of the universe that accurately reflected the different sizes of stars that would be made, and how often they would be created…. [T]he researchers designed a model that tracked the population and size distribution of stellar-mass black holes over time to give them their eye-watering number. Then, by comparing the estimate with data taken from gravitational waves, or ripples in space-time, formed by black hole and binary star mergers, the researchers confirmed that their model was in good agreement with the data.

Astrophysicists hope to use the new estimate to investigate some perplexing questions that arise from observations of the very early universe — for instance, how the early universe became so quickly populated by supermassive black holes — often with masses millions, or even billions, of times greater than the stellar-mass holes the researchers examined in this study — so soon after the Big Bang.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – 40 Quintillion Black Holes are Lurking in the Universe, Study Projects

This week the Free Software Foundation’s board announced that for the first time in the organization’s 37-year-history, its 5,000-plus associate members will now be able to nominate and evaluate candidates for its board of directors.

Under new procedures adopted by the FSF board on January 17 and summarized here, the organization will proactively engage associate members with a sufficient history of association with the FSF in the recruiting process by inviting them to suggest board nominees and then research collectively those nominees’ suitability for a position on the board, including most importantly their record of commitment to free software ideals…. Following the new procedures, voting members (which include all current directors and are listed here) can start a process to recruit new directors, or a modified process to reconsider existing directors…

The FSF intends to first add several new directors in 2022, utilizing these new procedures, and then begin a review of existing directors. The FSF staff and board have made this expanded engagement process a high priority and are working together to put in place the necessary infrastructure to support it, with a target to activate it within the first quarter of 2022… Voting members will review the community’s nominations.

A nominee may be removed from consideration if at least two voting members vote to do so without opposition from other voting members. The voting members will discuss the candidates and decide which should move forward in the process next. The FSF’s associate members will then review each nominee’s application, then evaluate and comment on those nominees in a private, staff-moderated discussion forum. Voting members will review this input and privately interview the finalists to assess their candidacy, ideals, and commitment to free software, then vote on their appointment….

The process is designed such that new iterations for both recruiting new directors and reviewing existing directors can be run whenever the need arises in the future.
“Opening the director recruitment process to our associate members is a historic and welcome milestone for the FSF,” said FSF president Geoffrey Knauth. “We are pleased to engage the free software community in attracting new talent to our leadership who will keep the freedoms…. We have worked hard to strengthen governance standards at the FSF and to create a transparent leadership recruitment process. We look forward to tackling new challenges and opportunities this year.”

The FSF’s announcement calls the new “community engagement process” a “key result of a six-month consultant-led review designed to help make FSF governance and recruitment practices more transparent and participatory, while more systematically ensuring their commitment to the FSF’s values and principles.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – New FSF Procedures Let Its 5,000 ‘Associate Members’ Nominate New Board Members